California Startup Archives - Page 2 of 5

Temecula California Startup: Sightly Inks $5.6M In Venture Round

Sightly, a startup based in Temecula California has just announced a venture raise of $5.6 million dollars. The company specializes in connecting and engaging local businesses with customers through video.

The companies innovative platform utilizes video across the web and where it matters most in this decade, on their mobile device. Sightly helps businesses develop and manage interactive video campaigns through a real time dashboard that allows businesses to monitor their own success.

The company started out as a business focused video production company however John McIntyre the founder and CEO of Sightly has abandoned the production house business for the current model where the opportunity really exists.

Moscow based Bright Capital Digital also sees the great opportunity with Sightly. They led this $5.6 million dollar round. The company also attracted new investor Foresight Ventures.

Existing investors, Floodgate, Tomorrow Ventures, Bullpen Capital, Mack Capital and 500 Startups also participated in the round.

“We believe that video – particularly on mobile devices – is going to drive how consumers find and choose local businesses,” McIntyre said “This funding from both new and current investors not only validates this vision but supports its realization.”

“Local is exploding,” said Mike Maples of Floodgate. “Sightly not only has a compelling vision of where the market is heading for consumers and local businesses, but they have a breakthrough approach on how to make that vision a reality and create a game changer in local advertising.”

Linkage:

Check out Sightly here

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California Startup: SportsBoard Brings The Coaches Clipboard Mobile & To The Cloud

About 8 years ago software entrepreneur Gregg Jacobs was watching his youngest son try out for club lacrosse and soccer teams in California. What he noticed back then was that coaches for both sports were feverishly keeping notes on clip boards, turning pages, and scribbling things down wherever they could. Jacobs knew from his software background that there had to be a better way, however smartphones were just on the cusp and tablets hadn’t even been invented.

FastForward to 2011. With smartphones growing increasingly fast and iPads taking a firm place in the home and in enterprise, Jacobs decided to revisit that idea, and started California startup SportsBoard.

SportsBoard, in it’s simplest form is a player relationship management system for coaches. Think SalesForce or ACT for coaches to manage players. The platform has a cloud based component and a mobile component which allows coaches to quickly make entries for later analysis from their iPhones or iPads. When they get home, back to the office, or the gym they can quickly sync to the cloud and manage their teams on a desktop or laptop computer.

SportsBoard is now optimized for ten different sports; Soccer, Basketball, Baseball, Lacrosse, Football, Ice Hockey, Field Hockey, Tennis, Volleyball and Rugby. Jacobs tells us that Softball is in the pipeline as well.

Over the last eight months over 100 Division I through Division 3 colleges have adopted SportsBoard as their player management system.

We got a chance to interview Jacobs about SportsBoard and growing his startup just far enough outside the valley, to be considered “everywhere else”

Memphis Grizzlies Star Rudy Gay Featured In Los Angeles Startup MyStorey

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Memphis Grizzlies star forward Rudy Gay will be featured in myStorey (photo: nibletz LLC)

A new startup in Los Angeles called MyStorey is set to debut with some celebrity heavyweights in the mix, including Memphis Grizzlies star forward Rudy Gay.

myStorey is a we-commerce platform where users build online stores through the stories of their lives. They allow people the unique opportunity to tag the things in their personal photos from Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, or their blog and aggregate those tags into a shoppable store so that others can discover and shop them too. Celebrities, bloggers, brands, and even everyday people have found immense value in myStorey’s ability to transform their digital content into shopping opportunities.

myStorey worked with Rudy Gay’s social team to leverage his social media content and use it to highlight the products from his everyday life. myStorey will highlight some of the clothing and accessories that Gay wears in everyday life along with some of the luxury items that help bring his swag like his Audermars Piguet watch.

Anyone can use myStorey, whether you’re the average Joe or a trendsetter, myStorey lets you highlight the things you wear everyday and then helps people discover those items and purchase them.

Other celebrities participating at launch include:

US Open Surf Champion Lakey Peterson
Fitness guru Chalene Johnson
Jacksonville Jaguars Quarterback Jordan Palmer
Miami Marlin’s player Bryan Petersen
Miami Marlin’s player Logan Morrison
Beauty Biz CEO and expert Sumita Batra
HoneynSilk.com fashion blogger Stephanie Liu
Beachmint’s Social Media Coordinator Vaneza Pitynski

myStorey seems like a very innovative platform, and with the star power they’ve recruited in the beginning they should be in good shape for a successful launch. We got a chance to talk with the team behind myStorey, check out the interview below.

California Teenage Serial Entrepreneur Creates EdTech Startup StatFuse

Jeet Banerjee is a 20 year old entrepreneur from Fullerton California, a town outside Los Angeles. He started his first startup at age 17 and sold it. Since then he’s had numerous other innovative ideas and he’s also written a book called “The Pursuit of Passion: Entrepreneurs Guide To Turn Hobbies Into Successful Businesses.”. Now he’s teamed up with 18 year old Supan Shah to create an EdTech startup called StatFuse, that really benefit students in their age group.

Their idea actually came out of a bet. Shah bet Banerjee that he could get into Harvard. There was a lot riding on this bet and neither young man wanted to wait the four months it takes to find out if he was accepted. They were shocked to find there wasn’t a website where they could quickly enter grades, extra curriculars and test scores to see if getting into Harvard was even a possibility.

Like all other great startups, this idea steam rolled into an entire suite of patent pending tools for prospective college students to use. Now StatFuse can estimate your chances at getting into a school, keep track of your applications, provide tips to improve chances of getting into colleges and even give virtual campus tours.

While there are other college preparation tools out there, StatFuse has been created by two incredibly intelligent founders who are currently at the age where their tools would be the most relevant.

We got a chance to interview Banerjee, check out our interview below.

California Startup: RaffleForGood, A New, Easy To Use, Raffling Platform

As the holiday season continues we will continue profiling as many social entrepreneurs and their startups as we can. Greg Hoffman and Ben Daniel are two of those entrepreneurs. Their California startup, RaffleForGood, is exactly what the name suggests, a raffle platform to do some good.

With the rise in use of the internet businesses big, small, for profit and non profit want to use the internets vast reach to offer prizes in raffles to raise money for charity. The problem is, that posting a product on the internet, and raffling it off isn’t just time consuming, but there are mountains of legal red tape that prevent companies from raffling things off at their own whim.

RaffleForGood handles all of that for their users. They’ve simplified the raffling system down to just about listing a prize and starting the raffle.

“Basically, Raffle For Good is an online fundraising platform for organizations to raise money through an interactive, skill-based raffle system. Companies donate items to causes they support. The causes then list the items on their personal Raffleforgood.com subdomain, at which point they direct their supporters to purchase tickets. It’s a fun reinvention of the raffle designed to make online fundraising more effective, engaging, and exciting, for all parties involved.” Hoffman told us in an interview.

Check out the rest of our interview with Hoffman below:

With Election Over California Startup VIRURL Stages Banner Ads Protest At ad:tech

The votes have been counted and we have a new President, so what are the protestors going to do now. Well a Santa Monica startup in the ad space, called VIRURL used them to protest annoying banner ads on Thursday at ad:tech. ad:tech is one of the biggest digital advertising conferences in the world and is held annually at the Javits Center in New York City.

VIRURL is promoting a new “viral” ready content based ad unit called the SlideOut. The “Slideout” widget for web publishers is a tool designed to serve and monetize relevant partner content to site visitors unobtrusively. That partner content, in the form of a “recommended content” link is served to the user when they navigate to the bottom of the page, intuitively offering extra sponsored content that may be of interest. The feature has recently gone live on HollywoodAssistants.Tumblr.com, one of the most popular Tumblr blogs on the web.

VIRURL used the protest as an almost flash mob like way to garner attention for their new product. It looks like it worked.

“We’ve built a company on an entirely different premise. It’s a business model that empowers advertisers in a way that the broken banner model never could. The energy we ignited today is just the beginning of our revolution. Virurl’s tools and technology are delivering 20x engagement (in terms of click through) and those numbers speak for themselves.” VIRURL CEO and Co-Founder Francisco Diaz-Mitoma told Nibletz.com exclusively.

“This is the next step in killing off the banner ad, which is going on 20 years as the most popular way to ineffectively monetize the web. The web has evolved by leaps and bounds in those two decades and so should its advertising,” said Diaz-Mitoma. “Web consumers hate banner ads and publishers and advertisers don’t make money from them. The new VIRURL Slideout solves this problem by positioning paid content in such a way that it gets a visitor’s attention without diminishing their online experience.”

“VIRURL already offers a 20x increase in CTR engagement over traditional banner advertising, and a new option like the Slideout can only serve to increase that engagement. Every time a user clicks on that VIRURL ‘Slideout’ on a blog or Tumblr like ‘Hollywood Assistant,’ the publisher makes 60% of the revenue from that transaction,” added Diaz-Mitoma. “This is all done with just a snippet of code, not only maximizing profitability for publishers, but doing so with complete ease-of-use. VIRURL offers unprecedented transparency and customization to both advertisers and publishers, as well as those they are trying to reach.”

Linkage:

Check out VIRURL here

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LA Startup FindHire Hopes To Be The Next Generation HR Software INTERVIEW

Los Angeles startup FindHire is hoping to be the next generation HR software. The startup, founded by Michael Dennis and Ryan Herman, blends contact management, project management and sourcing software for recruiters. Their web based solution makes it easy to access anywhere, across multiple locations or just one in home office location. The scalability and features give FindHire a serious advantage over other similar platforms.

Dennis and Herman were childhood friends. Dennis went on in recruiting and Herman got into development. They came back together as adults to create FindHire.

We asked Dennis how he came up with the idea for FindHire and he said:

“With my HR industry knowledge, I wanted to make an impact on HR technologies. With so much time-wasting software available, I realized I needed to fix this broken process and help people enjoy recruiting again. This intrigued Ryan who is a programming guru, and with this notion, we started building the next generation of HR software. Our hope is to alter the way companies hire and make the process fun and easier to manage.”

Check out the rest of our interview with Dennis below.

Manage All Your Bookmarks, Logins & Passwords With LA Startup MySocialCloud

Over the years browsers have become much more intuitive. All of the commercially used browsers have a keychain feature which allows you to save your logins and passwords, and even pre-populates them for you when you visit websites frequently. The problem with this current password storage method is it’s a cinch for anyone who gets access to your computer to view all of your passwords. In fact, one of the only real negatives I have with Mac’s is that they keep a similarly unsecure key chain on your hard drive as well.

There are a few startups out there that are tackling this problem with various password vaults. Most of these options keep your passwords in one spot and you need to remember the password to your vault and then look up the password by service.

Los Angeles startup MyScocialCloud is looking to streamline this process for you by storing your logins in the cloud. They make your passwords easily accessible by a browser plugin or bookmarklet. The best part is that they also keep your bookmarks organized as well. You don’t have to go searching through a password vault to find the password. MySocialCloud gives you the simplicity of a browser side or hard drive based keychain, but in the cloud, and more secure.

We got a chance to talk with Stacey Ferreira, the founder of MySocialCloud about her startup. Check out the interview below:

L.A. Entrepreneur Launches Social Network Startup For Film Makers In Post Production

Unless you’re one of those award winning notorious film makers like say Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, or even Aaron Sorkin these days, it can be hard to find others to collaborate with, share feedback and share ideas. As L.A. entrepreneur Cosmo Scharf discovered, it’s even tougher at the post production level. That’s why he created Blosmo.

Scharf, a student at the University of Southern California, decided he wanted to start a social network for film makers. As he tells us in the interview below, after collaborating with his buddy Corey, they narrowed down the social network to those in post production.

Blosmo is as much a collaboration tool as it is a social network. Right now, independent film makers don’t have many avenues for feedback, ideas and suggestions. YouTube comments, when they aren’t spam, are immature and not very helpful. Even though Vimeo has a more professional audience, the comments aren’t very useful either.

Blosmo gives their community members access to a higher level of feedback from likeminded, professional or semi professional film makers. Comments on Blosmo are incentivized through a point system where users can actually receive prizes and rewards sponsored by film companies. The points also give film makers access to discounts on gear and equipment.

Check out our complete interview with Scharf below.

San Diego Startup Expeerience Crowdsourced Event Photos For Everyone

There are a few startups out there vying for the position to be the platform that allows people at an event to all upload photos from the same event. San Diego startup Expeerience is one of those companies.

Expeerience allows users to share videos and photos at events. When individual Expeerience users upload their photos at any particular event they are put together with all of the photos and videos from other users at the same event. Essentially, Expeerience is crowdsourcing photos and videos from their users at events, creating one big gallery of event photos.

With many of the other photo sharing apps available today people take photos and videos and upload them to their existing social networks. If they’re at a big event there’s a good chance time lines will be filled with similar photos. However, as co-founder Stephen Boyd explains in an interview with nibletz, after the event everyone goes their separate ways. Social networks begin filling with the next big event.

Expeerience keeps an ongoing record in a “collection” with all the photos from the same event that users can go back to over and over again. Expeerience users can also save event photos from other users. At a small event like a wedding, users can easily save the bouquet toss and dancing photos from other users. They can do the same thing at a football game for big plays and touch downs.

Boyd compares Expeerience to a “Pinterest style Twitter”.

Check out our interview with Boyd below.

California Startup: Bubbs Connects You To Charitable Products INTERVIEW

A new Orange County startup called Bubbs is looking to become the go-to place to find products that are being sold to benefit charities and causes across the globe. When you go to mybubbs.com you’ll see a familiar online mall experience, except in this case all the products are benefiting some kind of charity.

Bubbs is somewhat similar to DoGoodBuyUs, a New York startup that we covered back in June. The main difference is that DoGoodBuyUs connects products that were specifically made for charity whereas most of the Bubbs products are more traditional in nature but somehow proceeds are benefiting charity.

Red Beats By Dre headphones, where $5.00 of the purchase goes to AIDS research, can be found on Bubbs. An iPad case which gives a week’s worth of HIV medicine to someone living in Africa can also be found on the page. Clothing, food, other gadgets and even makeup with a purpose can be found on the mybubbs site. Now you can shop for charity in one spot rather than scouring the internet looking for charity kick backs, site by site.

We got a chance to talk to Atila Lotfi the founder of Bubbs, check out the interview below:

Santa Monica Startup: DocRun To Challenge Legal Zoom, And Do It Better?

If you were to hear a pitch from a legal startup that planned to offer do it yourself access to legal forms, you would immediately think of LegalZoom right? Who would enter into a space crowded by a giant like LegalZoom? That would be as asinine as pitching an online auction site for collectibles, clothing, accessories and every day junk right?

Well Santa Monica based startup DocRun is doing just that. Of course their position is that they’re going to do it better.

DocRun has positioned itself to become the site to go to when small companies, and even startups need legal documents that may otherwise cost them thousands of dollars. When a user goes to the site they can create highly customizable, attorney level legal documents by answering a handful of relevant questions.

DocRun isn’t your run of the mill startup though. The company’s founder is Jennifer Reuting a nationally known expert on small business and corporate structuring. She is the author of the book “Limited Liability Companies For Dummies”.

This is also not her first foray into web platforms for small businesses. Reuting created InCorp.com the third largest registered agent service provider in the country and MyLLC.com a business entity formation service. Reuting has baked patent pending “artificial intelligence” into DocRun. This technology trumps LegalZoom’s one size fits all legal document service.

We got a chance to interview DocRun check out the interview below.

San Diego Startup: The Tip Network Is PayPal For Servers

Although restaurant and hospitality industry technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the years, one area where it still falls short is tipping. That’s where San Diego startup The Tip Network comes in.

With the economy the way it is these days restaurant owners and managers are mice-managing their shift schedules even more than they ever have before. Owners are managers are quick to make cuts to their wait staff the minute they can. This causes a major pain for servers. In a lot of restaurants servers either need to stick around after getting cut or at the end of their shift, come back at closing time or wait until the next day to reconcile their tips and tip out. This can be a major pain point for servers.

The Tip Network offers solutions for problems like that and other problems that plague proprietors of tip based businesses.

Tip Network is a cloud based tip management solution for independent and chain restaurants. We enable managers to easily track, allocate, and distribute tips digitally to their staffs Tip Network. Each staff member has their own unique Tip Network profile that allows them to (1) send money to any account, at any bank (2) send money to anyone in the network, (3) and many other things down the road .

Using the Tip Network, servers take ownership and management of their tips over, instantly. Now, from the comfort of their own home, or device they can tip out to support staff, move tips to their bank accounts even pay back loans to other servers. Like PayPal, with The Tip Network users get their own ID and can move their tips around anywhere in the network.

Founder Greg Crisci has first hand experience as a server and knows the pain that his startup hopes to solve. He’s busy these days looking for integration partners and preparing the implementation of his new tipping alternative. He did take a few minutes to talk to us though. Check out the interview below:

Interview With Mark Cuban Backed LA Startup: Mention Mobile

Shark Tank season 4 kicked off two weeks ago with Indiana University, Kelley School Of Business graduate Derek Pacque’ turning down a $200,000 investment offer from Dallas Maverick’s owner and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Pacque’ turned down the investment because of the equity stake Cuban wanted in exchange.

That wasn’t the case with Mention Mobile founder Ryan Ozonian. Ozonian took a one in a million shot and sent Cuban an email with a two year old blog post. According to Ozonian in just 8 minutes Cuban replied. That single email exchange led to Cuban investing $250,000 back this time last year. Cuban followed that investment up with another undisclosed investment in April of this year.

Mention Mobile is a social gaming company that already has a handful of titles under the belt utilizing the popular Facebook platform. Some of their titles include: Trivia Friends, Doodley, and Zombie Bash: Christmas Attack. Their about to launch a new game, partnering with Chillingo as the publisher, called Word Derby. They expect to get that game out to users later this fall. It will be the first asynchronous word game for Chillingo.

We got a chance to talk with Ozonian about what he and MentionMobile are doing in the interview below: